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GEEK TRIVIA

If You Want To Dig Through The Earth To Get To China, You’d Better Start In?

Sweden

The United States

Argentina

Nigeria

Answer: Argentina

Although the trope of “digging to China” was a common one in mid-20th century Western cartoons like those produced by Warner Brothers, and many a parent has joked that their child, furiously digging in the sand box, was working on digging their way to China, it turns out digging your way through the Earth (if such a feat were possible) from anywhere in, say, North America, doesn’t get you anywhere near China. In fact, you’d end up in the ocean off the coast of Australia.

So where should you start digging if you want to bore a nice straight hole through the Earth and end up in China? Argentina. It’s the country with the most landmass directly mirroring China on the other side of the globe, so if your goal is to boldly wield a sandbox shovel in search of a faster route to the Far East, that’s the place to start. Make sure you stick to the northern regions of Argentina though; if you start your excavations in the south of Argentina, you run the risk of ending up in Mongolia.

Interesting note. Assuming you have a friction free tunnel, it will take the same amount of time to free fall through the tunnel from one location on the surface of the earth to the other. In other words a free fall in a tunnel from Argentina to China would take the same amount of time as a in tunnel from New York to San Francisco.